Fur, Feathers, Fins, and Flowers

This was my third time visiting South Africa, and the shortest amount of time I have ever spent there. We stayed less than three weeks, after living there for three months once and six months another time. Somehow Thea and I still saw more of the country this time than we had on either of those longer stays.

So much of what I keep thinking about now has fur or feathers, or fins.

A baby elephant came right up to the ground-floor balcony outside our rooms, then her mother joined her. More than twenty whales swam alongside our boat.

A monkey came into our place, took the bananas, and threw the peels onto the balcony. We saw a lion less than five minutes after entering Kruger Park, dozens of elephants, and one giant grandmother elephant who looked like a baby woolly mammoth.

Then there were the birds, so many kinds that I started imagining thirty-five of them tattooed across my body. We watched the starlings explore and thought about what birds can teach spiritually led people about the land they live on.

Thea and I are still building our relationship with animal kin, and on this trip we noticed how much of our joy and grief work happens alongside them too.

But the most important relationships on this trip were actually not new ones. I finally got to meet Naaz in person after working with her for almost a decade. She started as my production assistant on Fare of the Free Child podcast around 2017, and after years of creating and problem-solving and growing from different parts of the world, there we were in the same place.

We reconnected with old friends, made new ones, and spent time with Moya, our Soweto guide, who is from Alexandra township. He talked with us directly about the political and social turmoil in South Africa and helped us get closer to what can look, from a distance, like a single story about xenophobia.

On that tour we learned about the annual commemoration for the Black school children who were massacred in Soweto. People put on their old school uniforms and walk the path back to the place where the children died. They say the names, and they keep walking. They talk about continuing with joy because they still have breath, and a fight worth continuing.

I was so moved by the way that they understand the way grief does not stay in the past. It comes back every year, right on schedule, and the people who carry it keep walking toward it anyway. That understanding felt familiar to us. Important. Educational. Empowering. Even in the middle of the incredible pain, the people there wove hope, memory, and joy into the fabrics of their futures. We are grateful to them for allowing folks to visit and learn.

I also got to dance with Zulu people in Soweto, and yes, there is video.

Thea and I already know Bringing Flowers will return to South Africa. We want more conversations with people who can speak from inside the country's histories and its present tensions. We want more time with the land itself. We are still processing what this visit taught us, and I suspect we will be for a while.

Have you ever returned to a place and realized you had started tending a relationship with it, instead of just visiting? I would love to hear what place that was for you, and how you knew the tending had begun.